Will AUKUS nuclear sub deal provoke China? | DW News

This is the USS Minnesota, a nuclear-powered attack submarine. It can stay underwater for months and is hard to detect. Few countries have this technology and even fewer build it. Now Australia wants to join that club. It's making a long-term strategic bet. That's why Australia is teaming up with the UK and the US in what's become known as AUKUS. The deal puts Australia in the hot seat between the US and China. AUKUS will take decades, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and there are warning signs that it might not ever deliver what Australia is hoping to get, nuclear-powered submarines. So does AUKUS still make sense? And will it actually work out? That if Australia has more capabilities, it injects more stability into the region. AUKUS is actually creating a security problem when of course its intention is to help us solve a security problem. We will get to that security problem. But first a quick recap. What is the AUKUS deal about? In the first step, the US and the UK are going to deploy nuclear submarines to Australia. Then the United States is expected to sell Australia three Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s. And finally, the three countries will work together to develop an entirely new class of submarines. Australia is supposed to get five of them in the 2040s. Just to make it clear here, we are not talking about submarines that carry nuclear weapons. They use nuclear power for propulsion. And that kind of technology is really expensive. Right now, the price tag for Australia is 264 billion US dollars. Australia is only the second country in the world to get this technology from the United States. It is the most intimate kind of technical, operational and strategic partnership that you could possibly think of, except perhaps for the sharing of nuclear weapons. This is Sam Roggeveen, a security expert at an Australian think tank. In the past, he worked for Australian intelligence. AUKUS ties us much more closely to the United States. It is simply impossible to enter into an agreement of this intimacy and of this length of, you know, 30 years plus our relationship with the United States on this technology. And then to achieve, to say that you are independent. So it's a long-term commitment that puts Australia shoulder to shoulder with the US. But the AUKUS deal was announced in 2021, when Joe Biden was the US president. And when a US security commitment seemed much different than what it might be now. We'll be discussing AUKUS with the prime minister, sir. But what does that mean? That moment of hesitation by Trump was a big news story in Australia, because the administration said it had to put AUKUS under review. The Pentagon eventually said it's a go. We're strengthening AUKUS that works for America, for Australia and for the UK. Can Australia rely on the Trump administration's commitment to AUKUS? It's a very fair question. Has this changed? Because so much has changed under President Trump. This is Charles Edel, a strategy expert at a think tank and a former US State Department official. But this initiative in particular that takes some of America's most willing allies and helps make them more capable is just the type of initiative that speaks to the Trump administration about wanting allies to become stronger and more capable. So the short answer is yes, it still remains viable under the Trump administration. But the question of US reliability goes beyond Trump, because the deal is all about the US strategy versus China. The Chinese navy has more ships than any other in the world and is adding more every year. And the US can't keep up. The reason we should be worried about American reliability is not because of who is president, but because of how big the adversary is. And the question we should be asking ourselves in Australia is, is the adversary so big that the Americans will be tempted to say, well, sorry, our vital interests are not at stake here. We do not want to fight with China, because if we fight with China, we may very well lose. And therefore, you have to do more for yourselves in Australia. So we now under AUKUS are tying ourselves to a country which may not be as committed to defending its position in Asia as we think they are. Proponents say AUKUS is about deterrence. If you have deterrence, it will deter the Chinese from becoming ever more politically and militarily assertive in the Indo-Pacific region. Currently, the balance of power is not as favorable to the United States and its allies as it was before. One of the areas where the United States has what is assessed to be a clear military advantage over the Chinese is in the undersea domain. That is, it's harder for the Chinese to understand to find where American submarines are located, particularly those that are nuclear propulsion submarines, because they can stay underwater for almost an unimaginable length of time. So that's why AUKUS is important, because it actually is an area where the United States and its allies and partners really do have an advantage. Key to this strategy is this Australian naval base, HMAS Stirling. Remember the US and the UK are supposed to deploy submarines to Australia? They are going to operate from this base starting in 2027. This gives the US options beyond its current submarine bases in the Pacific. Crucially, Stirling is harder to reach with Chinese missiles than other US bases in the region. The plan is for the US to eventually deploy four submarines and the UK one in Australia. That's a lot of boats in the water. And again, this matters because not only does it have more submarines in the area, which means that the Chinese have more challenges to think about, but it also means because in addition to having a rotational base there, there's a maintenance facility. Maintenance is really, really important. Submarines are highly technical instruments and they need to be serviced. And instead of sailing that submarine all the way back to either Hawaii or all the way back to the West Coast of America in California, having a maintenance facility in Western Australia means that boats can be pulled out of the water and then put back in the water quicker and can get to areas of interest quicker. So Australia allied itself strategically with the US. And it's not only about naval forces. There are also other rotational US deployments. What you have is a collection of capabilities that are going to be very tempting for China to want to disrupt. So in effect, my argument is simply that if we had done none of these things, if we had not launched the AUKUS submarine project, and if we had not agreed to the American basing in Western Australia and Northern Australia, then Australia would be far less prominent in the Chinese military's target list. And in fact, probably would not arise at all. So AUKUS is actually creating a security problem when, of course, its intention is to help us solve a security problem. But either way, Australia has a problem with its current fleet of six Collins-class submarines. They operate on diesel engines and batteries, meaning they can't stay underwater very long and can be easily detected. And they are very old. That means it costs a lot of money to keep them in service. But maybe Australia has some other advantages in a potential conflict. We have big things in our favor. The main one is geography. We are very far away from China. And so it is very difficult for China to project a lot of military force against us. So that's the kind of advantage. That's the kind of imbalance that Australia should be exploiting. And AUKUS, in fact, does the opposite of that. So the whole reason to get nuclear-powered submarines is because you want long range and long endurance. To me, the subtext there is that Australia wants to operate its submarines off the Chinese coast, thousands of kilometers away from Australia for months at a time. And it seems to me what you're doing there is giving away the biggest advantage that you've got, which is distance. If China ever wants to make trouble for Australia, then my argument is let them come to us. And there are a lot of doubts if the AUKUS timeline will work at all. The biggest question for many in Australia is will the US actually deliver the free Virginia-class attack submarines to the Australian Navy as promised? That's because the US has a serious backlog in its own submarine production. Even before AUKUS, US shipbuilding is way behind. So Australia is investing a lot up front for something it might not get. Because the US Congress has written into law that any submarine sale to Australia is only allowed if it doesn't weaken US capabilities. So there are investments being made, but they're not there yet. The entirety of AUKUS, and I think this is a really important point, is intended to supercharge the submarine industrial base of the United States and Australia and the United Kingdom. Meaning it's trying to supercharge the ability to produce submarines by one, not two, but three nations to begin to compete with what China has been doing on its own. Australia, the UK and the US all say the benefits outweigh the risks. And AUKUS is a project of such magnitude that scrapping it would be seen as a major strategic setback. In other words, it might just be too big to fail. There's already a lot of money has been spent already. And politically, it is very difficult for either side of politics to pull back from this project. So I think the last obvious opportunity for an Australian government to retreat from AUKUS has now passed. At the moment, it seems to me that the only thing that can disturb the momentum, the political momentum behind AUKUS, is if there's some major political rupture between Australia and the Trump administration. So will Australia get into the nuclear subclub? They seem to be in it for the long haul. Unless the US torpedoes the project or can't deliver.